LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

Classes have resumed here in Manila/Philippines, and our campuses are again swarming with pupils, students, teachers. Focused on their tasks, the same stakeholders are barely aware of what’s going on in the world around them, a world that is changing fast at confusing rate.

While the rugs under our feet our changing, the old context of large classes (class sizes of 100-250) are still in vogue in many universities worldwide. Some other universities that may have abolished them in the past, are re-instituting the large class platform.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the large class platform belongs to the past ages of medievalism and industrialism. To implement it now, at this time, is a regressive decision.

The large class, which unconsciously glues students to the ‘Herd instinct’, is anathema to the overall evolutionary movement of the human psyche towards greater individuation. University education is supposedly an opportunity field for the flourishing of that individuation.

The ‘mad discourse’ is finding expression in many venues today. The large class platform feeds inputs to the mad discourse, and is subtly rooted in it in fact. Its rationale hides under the rubric of technocratese language, but any sharp observer will easily unveil the illusion and show the large class platform’s connection to the ‘mad discourse’.

Imagine if all students are subjected to the same large classes, where they cannot air feedbacks or questions at all as they are consigned to passive receivers of inputs from a lecture professor. Imagine exposing freshmen students to this platform for 4-5 years, and assess the degeneration of the same students into the hovels of passivity.

Such a regimentation is just but one step short of what the Phase III cybernetics is up to these days: chipping humans. Phase III cybernetics had worked out to erase the dividing line between human behavior and machine behavior, with practical uses aimed at chipping all humans in the future.

The same chipped humans can then be put under the control of mega-computer systems, their behavior eventually reprogrammable to make them more in tune with what the System demands. They can be sent to war fronts as armies and technicians, and will experience no fear as fear will be deleted or subjugated by mega-control commands from their own psyche.

Wars and police states of the near future will be easily justified with every technocratese language conceivable, rendering them as typical ‘mad discourse’ in the argot of Michel Foucault. Mad, in that the erasure of the boundary between reason and the irrational has been effectively erased or deleted.

If there is anything that university policy makers must do now, it is to abolish all large classes while there is still time. Globally, we concerned citizens are doing what we can to deter moves by elites to install nazi-type regimes in the West, leading to a global state later that will be in need of compliant citizens.

Let us all do our tasks now to take down school platforms that will be the launching pads for compliant humans who can be chipped in couples of years’ time. The VeriChip by Verizon Corp is now out, and before 2015 a more perfected prototype will be out, ready to be implanted to humans via syringe (by trained doctors/medics).

We still have the time to act, to note. Any decision that infringes on human liberties is dangerously fascistic, such as re-instituting or maintaining large classes.

Failing to act in time, we shall watch in horror as new ‘das boots’ kids will be churned out from our youth, commanded via chips to participate in building a Draconian deux ex machina of the near future. And they’re products of our universities, products of large classes.

By then, I will be having the last laugh. With resonating guffaws will I declare “I told you so.”

[Philippines, 27 June 2010]

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UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES IS NO. 34 IN WORLD’S BEST UNIVERSITIES IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES IS NO. 34 IN WORLD’S BEST UNIVERSITIES IN ENGLISH

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Good day from the Pearl of the Orient!

The University of the Philippines or UP, my country’s national university and among the esteemed world universities in ASEAN, recently landed at No. 34 rank among the world’s top universities in terms of English instruction, besting many world universities in the West and Asia. This is a gladdening news not only for my country and ASEAN, the news likewise glows my heart to euphoria as I am a sanguine alumnus of the noble UP.

Please note that UP’s English instruction goes further than instruction, as many of its professors and alumni dominate the prestigious literary and scientific writing awards in the country, such as the Palanca award. The UP is also home to professors who are holders of the very prestigious National Artist, National Scientist, and Ramon Magsaysay Awards.

UP’s professors, in other words, are active creators of ideas and ‘best practices’, a legacy that they have passed on to their students. Since the late 1990s, 1/7 of all the country’s patents and copyrights in any given year are those registered by professors, researchers and experts of the University of the Philippines.

Such a high level of instruction, creation, and practices by UP’s professors, who stand out in articulation and philosophic discourse, is a legacy of the American professors of colonial-era history. UP’s first professors were largely Ivy League alumni, seconded by alumni of top state universities in the USA. They were among the first professional volunteers to render immense service of enabling Filipino minds to meet the challenges of the modern world.

UP was envisioned, since the time of the Filipino revolutionary government of Aguinaldo yet, as the premier university that will train tomorrow’s leaders for the country. The American educators took off from that vision, as they were the ones mandated to chart the destiny of the university and provide it with the foundational professors.

The same professors brought along with them AngloSaxon philosophy, culture, and language. The AngloSaxon tradition had stayed with UP ever since, which begins with the perfection of English articulation (oral & writ), mastery of AngloSaxon philosophy (empiricism, positivism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy), critical thinking, debating method & style, and conversational savvy for high culture (legacy of Victorian culture).

UP’s language articulation belongs to the ‘school of Elegance’. The same American professors ensured that discursive elegance will endure, and they succeeded in their noble tasks. Till these days, amid the greater stress for social responsibility in UP, a trend that began in the ‘60s yet with the rise of campus radicalism, which could have shifted articulation to the ‘schoof of Simplicity’, elegance had persisted.

Having been in UP for a long time as student (bachelor’s to graduate school) and faculty (social sciences), I can share endless testimonials to the discursive rigor that one has to pass through in my alma mater. One has to learn elegance first of all and employ the same elegance in practice, with preponderance for your profession’s argot while in the company of professional peers.

Simplicity in articulation comes as you face a broader audience among social clientele, such as the marginal sectors and layman. Sure, learn to talk and write with simplicity as you’d face broader audiences and readers after leaving the UP’s august halls. But first of all, learn to be elegant.

And don’t forget, discourse with depth, be as recondite as the philosophical thinkers that shaped your mental bank and professors that mentored you. Perfect your English, be elegant, be philosophically recondite, and you’ll end up being well cultured and highly-bred.

Passing through UP’s language training is akin to entering an eye of a needle. It is truly tough, yet very psychically rewarding. At least the former dictator Marcos, whose English and philosophical sophistication are as polished as Berkeley’s or Hume’s, won’t scoff at your simpleton-sounding language if you happen to be an activist who wished imperialism and tyranny away, thus earning you astronomical insults from UP’s alumni stalwarts.

By the way, the Ateneo De Manila University, another world university and the country’s best private university, landed at No. 35. De La Salle University, an international-class institution, landed at No. 51. UP, Ateneo and De La Salle form a consortium, and they comprise a triune of universities whose alumni are a class in their own, class sui generis.

Big kudos to the UP, Ateneo, and La Salle for the triumph in the AngloSaxon language!

[Philippines, 12 July 2011]
I

RIZAL: MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

Erle Frayne  Argonza

Visionary genius, patriot, martyr for Philippine independence, Gat Jose Rizal was a man too far ahead of his own time. So titanic was the luck that came upon this blessed archipelago, the Philippine islands, for the embodiment among its humble people of this encyclopedic mind, Dr. Jose Rizal. He is impeccably a ‘man for all seasons’. And he is the national hero of the Philippine nation.

Most nations declare among their top patriots a warrior or military leader as their ‘national hero’. But for the Philippines, ours’ is a genius, an intellectual giant, a mind capable of engaging in issues so recondite and subjects so diverse that, in so short a span, he was able to pen an enormous variegation of topics that befit, in their totality, an encyclopedia. At the age of 35, he was terminated by the demonic imperial forces of Spain, but he never died in vain. On the contrary, his death continued to inspire libertarian patriots here and in other Asian lands, an inspiration that continues for our youth till these days.

Mystically gifted, little did people know that he was actually transformed into a spiritual guru before his death. His guruship was unique, in that he mentored his fellows on the wisdom of nationhood and patriotism. One of his avowed readers if not disciples, Mohandas Gandhi of India, followed in his steps and became, upon his transformation into a spiritual master, a mentor of nationhood and patriotism just like Rizal.

So mighty a mind Rizal possessed, without doubt, that till these days his works overshadow the combined works of his own fellow patriots, including those who’ve gained double doctorate degrees and published widely in academic circles. Rizal’s following is solid, he need not further articulate nor gesticulate thoughts in the vogue of a desperate social marketing campaign, for even long after his death, youthful and scholarly minds read him, try to follow his ethical precepts, and emulate his exemplary patriotic behavior.

He was the first Filipino. Before his time, the term Filipino was bestowed only on those Spaniards born and raised in the Philipines. The Malayan natives were pejoratively called Indios; Chinese, Sangleys; Aetas and IPs, negritos and montanosas; and Muslims, Moros. With scathing indictment of arrogant racism of  Spaniards most especially the friars, Rizal declared, with his mighty pen, that from this day on everybody born and raised in the islands will be called Filipino. That was how we islanders were to be bestowed with the name Filipino, a term that will stick till way into the distant future when a ‘Filipino race’ will evolve from out of a mere nationality today.

In his thoughts he pre-empted the political philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, the eminent Marxist leader of the Italian Left. Rizal mentored his fellow patriots that it will prove unwise to wage an insurrectionary campaign and seize political power, at a time when the ideas of nationhood haven’t permeated the private sphere yet. The most fitting strategy for that long-term goal—of building nationhood—is education. Build the new world’s ideas first till they become hegemonic, after which winning a revolution will be more facile as it was in the French revolution. That’s Rizal, and that’s Gramsci as well, but Rizal preceded Gramsci, let the world be made aware of this fact.

In gender relations, Rizal was no less ahead of his time. He scorned the ‘Old World woman complex’ so deeply that he chose to bury this woman in catacombs of history, which he did by killing Maria Clara, the Old World’s embodiment, in his novels. He advanced the idea of Modern Woman in the figures of the ‘women of Malolos’, even as he championed women who were civic-minded, actively engaged as co-partner in shaping the modern world, intellectually adroit and well-schooled. The Filipino nation he likened to the figure of Sisa in his novels, a nurturing mother who no matter under dire duress will never self-destruct but will stand out firm, tall and well-esteemed by fellows.

Amid Rizal’s liberalism, he never had any fondness for anarchism. Following Zola’s novel-writing tradition (e.g. Germinal), Rizal embodied the anarchist in the young bourgeois creole Ibarra who, at the end of his novel scripts, self-destructed. Anarchism can never be a substitute for prudent authority that should follow the Enlightenment principles of reason, progress, fraternity, and scientific verity. He was a true-blue liberal nationalist, never an anarchist.

We Filipino nationalists will continue to be inspired by Gat Jose Rizal. And his thoughts, the most treasured jewels of Asia during his time, will continue to inspire us, diadems that we magnanimously share to all enthused Fellows of the Planet, thoughts that mentor and serve as balm on the soul, like unto those writ by the most sagely personages. For these are the thoughts of a man no less sagely than the wisest of the days of old, thoughts that long after they are gone will continue to make waves into the minds of men and women of many generations yet to come.

Hail Gat Jose Rizal! Glory, genius, grandeur!

[12 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]